Elections in Estonia and the current parliamentary elections (I)

Ismael Peña-López

6 years ago

Notes from the seminar Elections in Estonia and the current parliamentary elections: presentations by election administrators and experts, organized by the Government of Estonia as part of the 2019 Parliamentary Elections International Visitors Program and held in Tallinn , Estonia, on 2 March 2019.More notes on this event: valimised2019

Priit Vinkel, head of the State Electoral Office
Estonia also votes with paper ballots

Voting with paper is about tradition, ceremony, ritual. People love going to polling stations.

It is possible to vote multiple times online, but only the last vote will be valid.

1099 candidates, 10 party lists, 15 independent candidates, 880,000 voters in Estonia and 77,000 abroad, 441 polling stations.

253 people voted by mail, 1776 at an embassy, 247,232 by e-voting. e-Voting has been increasing all over the years and more women are voting now.

Voting from home on election day (paper) does not cease to decrease, now ranging 6,000 voters.

Discussion

Only 5.3 people verified their electronic vote.

Some people vote more than once online (only the last vote counts) and only a very few people would finally vote on paper after having voted online.

Liisa Past, McCain Institute
Current state of health of cybersecurity in Estonia and elsewhere

You introduce technology very carefully.

Security is never achieved. 100% security is not possible, but not only at the digital sphere.

“Elections are general, uniform and direct. Voting is secret” (Constitutions of the Republic of Estonia, 60)

An advantage of e-voting in Estonia is the electronic ID system provided by the Government.

Comprehensive risk management:

Voting
Election technology.
Auxiliary systems, facilitators and vendors.
Integrated information operations.

Compendium on Cyber Security of Election Technology (PDF).

Way forward:

Risk management.
International cooperation. Operational information exchange and exercises.
Cross-agency cooperation.
Last mile in the EU context.

e-Voting is not a technical question, but a political and organizational one.

Robert Krimmer, Tallinn University of Technology
Cost of voting technologies

Main source of the research: Krimmer, R., Dueñas-Cid, D., Krivonosova, I., Vinkel, P. & Koitmae, P. (2018). “How Much Does an e-Vote Cost? Cost Comparison per Vote in Multichannel Elections in Estonia”. In Krimmer et al. (Eds.), Electronic Voting, 117-131. Third International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2018, Bregenz, Austria, October 2-5, 2018, Proceedings. Cham: Springer.

There is a general tendency of declining turnouts around the globe, contested by the implementation of new voting channels to make voting more easy or convenient for the voter.

Cost calculation is a most complex problem: shared resources, infraestructures that can be reused, resources that do not compute as a cost (e.g. volunteers), etc.

	Voting Channel Cost per ballot (in Euro)
Early Voting in country centres	6.24
Advance Voting in country centres	5.07
Election Day Voting in country centres	4.61
Advance Voting in VDC	20.41
Election Day Voting in VDC	4.37
I-Voting	2.32